Good and evil in la Serenissima

The City of Falling Angels
By John Berendt
Penguin, 414 pp., $25.95

Note to the person in charge of marketing John Berendt's new book, ''The City of Falling Angels": Is it possible to include two free air tickets to Venice in, say, every thousandth copy sold? It takes an inordinate amount of willpower to read Berendt's funny, insightful, illuminating travelogue and not want to board the next flight to the mysterious, magical city of canals.

For those who have visited Venice, done the requisite touristy things such as feeding the pigeons at St. Mark's Square and taking the mandatory gondola ride, and then professed to know Venice, ''The City of Falling Angels" will come as a revelation. Much like its winding, narrow, labyrinthine streets, the true heart of Venice remains hidden from public view. The real city -- from its aristocratic high-society families to its bewildering bureaucrats and eccentric artists -- reveals itself slowly, discreetly, under Berendt's gentle but persistent prying.

Yes, the Venice familiar to the casual tourist is present -- here are the legendary masked balls, its famed glassblowers, the ubiquitous gondolas -- but Berendt's genius is showing us the stories behind these tourist-brochure images. Thus we learn about a sibling rivalry in which a son manages to secure a copyright on his famous glassblower father's name, a family struggle that results in the heartbreaking sale of a palace owned by four generations of American expatriates, and a suspicious suicide by a well-known Venetian poet whose publisher pretends to receive anonymous death threats.

Bringing the same bemused appreciation of the quirkiness of human nature that he brought to bear upon life in Savannah, Ga., in his wildly popular bestseller, ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," Berendt populates his new book with flamboyant, eccentric, conniving, and amusing characters. There is the Plant Man, a street vendor who is so covered by his wares that he appears to be ''a shrub that moved." There is the Director of Animal Affairs, whose job it is to stealthily capture and kill the famed pigeons of Venice, in a vain attempt to keep their numbers down. There is the Rat Man of Treviso, who has made his fortune manufacturing and selling rat poison worldwide. His secret? He believes rats eat what people eat, so he adds local culinary ingredients to his poisons: Dutch rats ate a poison with salmon and cheese, whereas the rats of India ate a curry-flavored venom. There is a hilarious moment when the Rat Man has an epiphany: After decrying the trend of Italian rats preferring plastic to Parmesan cheese, he realizes that ''people eat nonfood, too. . . . We eat fast food! Fast food is nonfood! Plastic is the rats' equivalent of fast food! It means that all is well: Rats are still imitating the eating habits of people."

Berendt uses a pivotal event in contemporary Venetian history to tie these disparate characters and their stories together. The event is the 1996 fire that destroyed the historic Fenice Opera House. Using the fire as a framing device allows him to examine the social and cultural mores of modern Venice -- the automatic presumption of Mafia involvement in the fire; the bungled investigation that first declared the fire an act of negligence and, later, arson; the slow, tortuous, at times farcical rebuilding of the Fenice.

Indeed, Berendt's Venice often has a farcical quality to it and it is obvious that this, in part, is why he loves it so. The book is full of amusing anecdotes such as the one in which Woody Allen, who was scheduled to play at the Fenice before the fire, arrives for a sympathetic, morale-boosting tour of the burnt building -- and is promptly charged with trespassing on a crime scene. And there are wonderful vignettes, such as the one involving Ralph Curtis, a fourth-generation American expatriate and part owner of the famed Palazzo Barbaro (where Henry James stayed in 1887). When Berendt phones Curtis to discuss the impending sale of the Barbaro, he discovers that he has also reached the ''Earth liaison station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet of Mars." Turns out that Curtis is head of the Barbaro Project, which aims to establish world peace by getting heads of state to surrender their nuclear codes to him so that he can put them on a spaceship and blast them off to Mars.

But just when you wonder if there are any normal, ordinary Venetians living in Venice, Berendt will drop a detail that reminds you of the city's timeless place in history. The list of people who have spent time in Venice is endless -- here, Ezra Pound lived out his life with his mistress Olga Rudge, James completed ''The Portrait of a Lady," and art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim lies buried along with her beloved dogs. History is everywhere and pops up in the most unlikely of places -- the restoration of the Malibran Theater results in the unearthing of Marco Polo's house, built in the 13th century.

But the grace of Berendt's book is that, despite its title, this is not a book about angels or history. Ultimately, ''The City of Falling Angels" works because this is a book about flesh-and-blood, flawed, larger-than-life human beings -- and the flawed, larger-than-life city they are all proud to call their home.

Thrity Umrigar is the author of the novel ''Bombay Time." Her new novel, ''The Space Between Us," will be published in January.